


drag me to the deep

by glundergun (cleardishwashers)



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Episode: s11e09 The Gang Goes to Hell, Implied Mac MacDonald/Dennis Reynolds, M/M, Navel-Gazing, Near Death Experiences, Substance Abuse, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 14:31:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21339772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/pseuds/glundergun
Summary: the gang after the events of goes to hell, with some flashbacks to Previous Events™.
Relationships: Charlie Kelly & Dennis Reynolds, Charlie Kelly & Mac McDonald & Dee Reynolds & Dennis Reynolds & Frank Reynolds, Dee Reynolds & Dennis Reynolds, Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	drag me to the deep

There have been many times where he’s thought he was going to die before. This time was different.

He tips back his glass, lets the bitter-smooth whiskey slide down his throat like it’s done a thousand times before, ignores the growling of his stomach. He can feel the weight of Dee’s eyes upon him, because he’s pressed against Mac (who isn’t warm, not like he usually is, like a fucking radiator, and Dennis blames the ocean) so that they’re more like one large lump of slightly damp blankets, and her stare is burning like his mother’s cigarettes. If he ever told her that he’d compared her to their mother, she’d slap the taste out of his mouth.

They were twenty-one once, even though it seems like ages ago, when the dull monotony of life had still been fresh and new and exciting and they were still riding the high of being able to drink in the eyes of the law. The day after their birthday, he and Dee had gone to a liquor store and legally bought all the Jack Daniels they could carry and then gone to a shady street corner and illegally bought weed from a guy who jacked up the prices way less than Mac did. He hadn’t been speaking to Mac, for some reason, and Charlie had taken Mac’s side, so he and Dee had gone home and gotten crossfaded. He’d waited for Dee to light her own joint, and then he’d plucked the lighter neatly from her hands and lit his own. He’d almost missed the big clunky backbrace— even though it was hideous and disgusting and an assault on his ears as well as his eyes, with Dee in it, he would look better by comparison. She would be bigger than him, uglier, the twin who managed to get herself trapped in a metal cage.

He didn’t tell her that, though. He chucked the lighter back at her when she complained, he smoked three joints down to the bare bones, he finished at least one bottle of Jack. They were twenty-one, and with Dee out of the backbrace they were both golden once more, and they were the kings of the world. And when the morning came and the cold tile stung his knees as he sprawled on the bathroom floor, the world shook and crumbled beneath him. He flipped off Dee as she asked him about an ambulance—  _ why the hell did you drink so much on an empty stomach, you goddamn idiot— _ he’s not sure which voice is Dee’s and which one is his mother’s, because in her quest to grow in the complete opposite way as Barbara, Dee forgot to uproot herself from her mother’s garden.

He eventually learned to distinguish panic from anger, separate the twisted threads of something ashen and dying from something hacked half to death yet still green, but it didn’t happen that morning, and he wondered if he was going to die with his mother beside him instead of his sister.

He slams the whiskey glass on the tray top with far more force than is necessary. The steward— scared shitless by Dennis’s mid-flight rant, but what the hell is first class for if you’re not getting your drinks on time?— scampers forwards and refills it. Dee is still staring at him, waiting for an explanation that won’t come. He wants to snap at her, ask her what the hell her problem is, but if he opens his mouth then he’s afraid that salty ocean water will pour out once more and his body will work against him to expel everything from his lungs even though he’s sick of fighting it.

He was going to die on the Jersey Shore with his twin sister beside him— and  _ no, _ the irony of them leaving the world together just like they came in was  _ not _ lost on him— and it would be a fitting death for Dennis Reynolds, but not for the Golden God. These people did not befit the Golden God, smeared dark crimson across him in an effort to dull him, like messy children with ketchup-covered hands. He knelt in the coarse sand, and he could feel every single particle digging into his skin, and the world moved in slow motion but he still can’t remember what exactly happened, because one minute he was going to die and the next minute sand was being flung in someone’s face and he and Dee were sprinting out of there as fast as they possibly fucking could. They ran, and none of the bullets hit them, and for a second he thought that the Golden God had enveloped him, protected him from all harm, and then he fell to his knees and spilt the meagre contents of his stomach onto the sand. Water suddenly buffeted him, teeth-chatter cold and just as forceful, pulling the sand out from under his hands and knees in a more abrasive manner than simply kneeling ever could. And even as Dee was yelling  _ get up get up please Dennis you goddamn idiot we need to go _ he wondered if he could dissolve into sea foam and float away. Maybe he could even get to Europe.

This time was different. Dennis takes another sip of the whiskey to avoid staring at Dee or even glancing at Mac, and he wonders why in the hell this time was different. Maybe it was because Mac said  _ I’m gay, _ in such a matter-of-fact way that Dennis had wondered if he’d ever fought it at all. Dennis had wondered a lot of things in the time between Mac coming in and the two of them grasping hands underwater, because if Mac’s faith in God was gone then Dennis’s faith in a carefully prescribed order was too and there should’ve been nothing stopping him from saying something,  _ anything. _

_ “Can you mark down in your report, uh, that I’m not gay? Because I’m not.” _

Dennis was going to die holding Mac’s hand, holding it so tightly that no water could make its way into the little nooks and crannies that result out of holding someone else’s hand. He thought about every other time that he could’ve died in the past, and every single time he hadn’t accepted it. This time he had. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he was going to die holding Mac’s hand, and he was going to die with his sister right next to him, and he was going to die with Charlie floating just a few feet away (and he might’ve hated Frank in life, but he made Charlie happy, so Dennis couldn’t object to dying with Frank there too). He squeezed Mac’s hand tighter. The light coming from above cast a shining hue on Dee’s cornsilk hair. It was fitting that one of them would die golden, anyways. The other one had Mac.

When the door opened, Dennis only swam up because Mac did. And then Mac had gone and undone his confession (even though that’s not at all how it fucking works, and Dennis’s heart had caught fire the moment Mac had said it).

Dennis presses himself into Mac’s side even farther, almost angry, almost heartbroken, and as the plane’s wheels touch the wet tarmac and they all go bouncing around like beads in a maraca, he wonders if things will change. He’s deluding himself if he thinks that they will immediately, because they’re not the type of people that do that, but he thinks that maybe, over time, they can try.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! drop me a line at @glundergun on tungle :) kudos/comments always appreciated!


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